ou see a deep tinge of verdure, the line of which,
you believe, must be produced by the oozing moisture--you follow it, and
by-and-by there is a descent palpable to your feet--then you find
yourself between low broomy knolls, that, heightening every step, become
ere long banks, and braes, and hills. You are surprised now to see a
stream, and look round for its source--and there seem now to be a
hundred small sources in fissures and springs on every side--you hear
the murmurs of its course over beds of sand and gravel--and hark, a
waterfall! A tree or two begins to shake its tresses on the horizon--a
birch or a rowan. You get ready your angle--and by the time you have
panniered three dozen, you are at a wooden bridge--you fish the pool
above it with the delicate dexterity of a Boaz, capture the monarch of
the flood, and on lifting your eyes from his starry side as he gasps his
last on the silvery shore, you behold a Cottage, at one gable-end an
ash, at the other a sycamore, and standing perhaps at the lonely door, a
maiden like a fairy or an angel.

This is the Age of Confessions; and why, therefore, may we not make a
confession of first-love? We had finished our sixteenth year--and we
were almost as tall as we are now; for our figure was then straight as
an arrow, and almost like an arrow in its flight. We had given over
bird-nesting--but we had not ceased to visit the dell where first we
found the Grey Lintie's brood. Tale-writers are told by critics to
remember that the young shepherdesses of Scotland are not beautiful as
the fictions of a poet's dream. But SHE was beautiful beyond poetry. She
was so then, when passion and imagination were young--and her image, her
undying, unfading image, is so now, when passion and imagination are
old, and when from eye and soul have disappeared much of the beauty and
glory both of nature and life. We loved her from the first moment that
our eyes met--and we see their light at this moment--the same soft,
burning light, that set body and soul on fire. She was but a poor
shepherd's daughter; but what was that to us, when we heard her voice
singing one of her old plaintive ballads among the braes?--When we sat
down beside her--when the same plaid was drawn over our shoulders in the
rain-storm--when we asked her for a kiss, and was not refused--for what
had she to fear in her beauty, and her innocence, and her filial
piety?--and were we not a mere boy, in the bliss of passion, ignorant o